1

Why “Total” Meditation?

If someone asked me what to expect from meditation, I’d reply, “Anything and everything.” Meditation involves transformation. It affects every aspect of your well-being and can bring about positive change in your body, affect your mental outlook, increase your decision-making ability, and eliminate worry and anxiety. Meditation techniques are numerous—they can take you in a hundred different directions—but at heart they aim to answer one not so obvious question: Can existence take care of itself? If the answer is no, then all the struggle and frustration that enters everyday life is justified. You believe that nothing and no one are going to take care of you except yourself. That is why you are under so much stress.

However, if the answer is yes, a new life awaits everyone. The idea that existing—just being here right now—can bring fulfillment sounds objectionable, almost alien. It’s not outlandish to your body, however. By their very nature, the cells in your body operate effortlessly. Likewise, your tissues and organs are effortlessly self-sustaining. In an average lifetime the heart beats a billion times, a prospect that baffles the mind, especially if you think of the heart as a machine that must keep pumping blood seamlessly without a glitch. No computer can be turned on a billion times and no airplane take off a billion times without the risk, or even certainty, of mechanical failure. But in the web of life, the heart—if, of course, it is healthy—undertakes its labors with complete lack of struggle. On average, our heart beats between 60 to 100 times a minute. Fascinating when you truly think about it. But then consider a shrew’s heart, which beats 1,000 times a minute, or a hummingbird’s, which can reach 1,250 beats per minute. The wonder is, their hearts work effortlessly, too.

The heart, while extraordinary, is by no means exceptional. In a normal healthy person, the community of organs—skin, heart, lungs, liver, brain—remains in balance and harmony quite effortlessly. But as we go about our daily activities, we rarely experience effortless harmony, either inside ourself or between ourself and others. Wars and domestic abuse have the same source in disharmony. Our worries are a symptom of disharmony, and if depression arises, it can sap the will to carry on. The notion that existence is enough seems ludicrous. But we can experience moments of equanimity, or even an extended period of equanimity, that at their fullest bring body, mind, and spirit into harmony. These interludes suggest that something more lasting can be achieved. That’s why meditation is a journey and not just a calm break from one’s daily routine.

If we can live knowing that existence can actually take care of itself at the level of the individual person, a radically new element will be added to modern life. We can live in a world in which there are no inner enemies like fear and anger roaming the mind beyond our control. Painful memories and unacceptable feelings will no longer be shoved down into the secret hiding places in the unconscious. We will be stirred from a state of virtual sleep that befalls us as mental dullness and inertia. (If you don’t think we live in a state of virtual sleep, just look around at the expressionless faces of people glued to their smartphones or waiting at the airport.) The awakened life is energetic and fully conscious, erasing the woes that so often arise through our unconscious ways.

MEDITATION IS ABSOLUTELY UNIQUE

Personal transformation is what meditation provides once you embark on the journey. The first step is realizing that awareness in some form is always present. Thinking (in essence, judging) isn’t the mind’s true character. Awareness is. In the background of everything you do, the heart beats ceaselessly. In the background of everything you think, awareness watches ceaselessly as well. We take both for granted, but that doesn’t remove their mystery and power. A research career can be spent in cardiology just to get a few steps closer to the hidden intricacies packed in a single heart cell. (It was recently discovered, to everyone’s bafflement, that the heart has twelve taste receptors of the kind usually found in the mouth, and these receptors are most strongly attuned to bitter taste. No reasonable explanation exists, but then, we don’t even know how the heart and circulatory system manage to maintain the same blood pressure in our toes and our head, despite the force of gravity.)

Recorded history has spent millennia trying to unravel the secrets of the human mind. Still, there is no consensus about how to explain consciousness and the ability to be aware of ourselves and the world around us. There is no alternative but to delve into your own awareness, which is where meditation begins. Meditation is practically the only human endeavor that explores the mind when it has no thoughts. Everything else in philosophy and psychology—or any other field of study—is about thoughts. Awareness precedes thoughts, but in modern life we have reversed things so completely that everyone’s life is built upon mental activity without having the faintest idea where thoughts come from. Certainly, the brain is involved, but it hardly holds the key. Though we have made great strides in trying to understand the three-pound gray mass in our skulls, nothing about a brain cell indicates that it is processing thoughts, feelings, and sensations. There are some amazing medical cases in which a person’s cerebral cortex, the thin layer on the outside of the brain responsible for higher thought, has been radically compressed by fluid pressure (so-called water on the brain, or hydrocephalus) beginning in infancy, and yet the person grew up without any sign, either to themselves or to others, that mental activity was impaired. Even more rarely, a benign growth can take over half of the cranial space or more, and yet once again the person seems mentally unaffected.

We think we get along well enough not knowing where thoughts come from, but that’s not really so. In a fascinating TED talk in April 2019, a British theoretical physicist, David Deutsch, pointed out that throughout history the universe has been characterized as a war zone. In ancient societies, this war was envisioned as a war between good and evil, which became internalized in humans as good and bad impulses struggling inside us. In modern times, science has abandoned the old mythology but kept the war, making it a war between order and chaos. If this analogy sounds abstract, we can see it humanized in the current climate-change crisis as the struggle between a sustainable planet and a wasteland.

These are all mental models, however, and they have persisted for so long, Deutsch says, that we are victims of “cosmic monotony.” Science has unwittingly continued the Old Testament notion that there is nothing new under the sun. What is the solution? Deutsch proposes that human beings are uniquely able to bring novelty into existence, which we do through new and deeper understanding. Thus as we wake up, the cosmos wakes up. In fact, Deutsch believes, the waking up has already begun, after billions of years of monotony.

The notion that human beings can make the universe wake up is very bold, but here is a physicist, someone who primarily deals with mathematical equations, putting consciousness front and center in the creative process. This extends a famous idea offered in the 1950s by the noted American physicist John Archibald Wheeler, who was the first to say that we live in a “participatory universe.” In other words, everything we think is real “out there” depends on our beliefs, perceptions, observations, interpretations, and expectations “in here.”

Leaving aside the cosmic implications, humans certainly create personal reality one individual at a time. What you make from the raw “stuff” of consciousness is unique to you. Therefore it makes perfect sense to explore how consciousness operates. There are rules and principles to be discovered, and what they determine is crucial to the way we all live our life.

THE PRINCIPLES OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Consciousness is awake and aware.

Consciousness crosses the boundaries of mind and body, matter and mind.

Consciousness is creative.

Once it creates something, consciousness keeps it in balance.

Consciousness is dynamic—it calls upon energy for action and change.

Consciousness is whole—it permeates everything in existence equally.

Consciousness is self-organizing—it oversees orderly systems and structures.

Consciousness is harmonious—every level of Nature is part of the whole. Every thread contributes to the cosmic tapestry.

These principles sound abstract, but they invisibly govern everything you think, say, and do. You speak intelligible thoughts, unlike the “word salad” of a schizophrenic, because your speech is orderly, organized, and regulated. A single memory, like the recollection of your sixth-birthday party, must be retrieved from scattered areas of the brain, where every memory is stored in fragments. Only by a nearly instantaneous reassembly do you have a coherent memory. When you remember something, a mental jigsaw puzzle is put together in consciousness. Likewise, you recognize faces thanks to several coordinated brain regions. At an even more basic level, you see a world of color through a complex process that knowingly fashions over two million shades of recognizable color from red, blue, and green, the only three wavelengths of light your retina responds to.

All this occurs without the processes knowing anything about the principles of consciousness. The proteins that construct your body number more than 100,000, perhaps up to a million, yet each is distinct. Each does its singular job precisely while whizzing past thousands of other proteins like random dust particles, and each acquired knowledge of what to do in some mysterious way unfathomable by the human mind.

Why is all of this important to meditation? Enormous benefits will arise from your understanding firsthand how consciousness operates. This understanding is what makes waking up unique. Waking up isn’t the same as thinking, nor is it the same as being sharp instead of groggy, smart instead of dull. Waking up is about learning how consciousness operates and then applying its principles accordingly. No other knowledge is like this, and none is more valuable.

What became known as the world’s religions, spiritual traditions, and wisdom schools have grown into a mountain of texts and teachings. Yet awareness demands little. To be aware is a simple state. A one-day-old baby looks around without comprehension, but it is aware nonetheless. Not yet understanding anything about its life, a newborn baby is prepared to understand everything that will unfold. Many babies have an irresistible smile on their faces. They know joy without knowing what joy is.

Most important, being aware aligns you with the creative impulse in Nature. If meditation is all about awareness, what we can accomplish is virtually unlimited.

TOTAL MEDITATION

The kind of meditation I am advocating in this book is called total meditation because it embraces all the principles of consciousness that exist to be understood and lived. The other kinds of meditation that are typically taught, no matter what school or tradition they belong to, are different. They are occasional meditations, practiced at a certain time of day, using a specific technique before going about the rest of the day as usual. Such an approach is like practicing the piano or your tennis swing—the hope is that the more you practice, the better you will get at it. While occasional meditation has its benefits—for instance, it can calm you down and lower your pulse rate temporarily—it is seriously limited. The few minutes a day spent in meditation are powerless to overcome the overwhelming flood of experiences outside meditation.

The briefness of occasional meditation doesn’t undermine the process—a huge amount of research validates the practice. Meditation cannot be blamed for losing the battle to change modern life when it was designed, centuries ago, against the relative stasis of lives spent on farms, in temples, and around family life. Even then, however, it was realized that total immersion in meditation was the ultimate answer to pain and suffering as well as the path to freedom. Traditional Indian life was divided into four stages, or ashramas, and the last, which was undertaken in late middle age, was a kind of double retirement. The person retired from work and family obligations, went into seclusion, and retired within themself through meditation.

Total immersion was also a choice for the few who were natural renunciates, who longed for an inward existence in place of work and family life. But neither model suits modern life or our newfound taste and widespread quest for personal spirituality. In this book, I want to go even further by offering a kind of total immersion that isn’t traditional or even “spiritual” in a religious sense (and where you don’t have to give up your day job). As I’ve just outlined, total meditation is an exploration of how consciousness works, with the goal of applying those principles to your own life.

For the vast majority of people who try occasional meditation, know that your practice gives you a taste of total meditation, a taste of stillness. This taste can be revealing, no doubt, because most people have had no extended experience of “quiet mind.” If they know what inner peace feels like, they still cannot call upon it whenever they want. However pleasant as it is to find peace and inner quiet in meditation, once you open your eyes, what does the mind do? It returns to the life it knows, a constant stream of worries, desires, demands, duties, wishes, hopes, and fears. Still, occasional meditation, while limited, can take the edge off, so to speak, and can often be the first step toward transformation in your life.

My taking up meditation in the early 1980s was a turning point in my life. Looking back, I see a stressed Boston doctor in his thirties who left the house before dawn and returned after sunset, and whose jangled nervous system seemed to need a daily supply of cigarettes and alcohol to settle itself down. I fell into those habits because every doctor around me back then, especially the overworked interns and residents, followed the same lifestyle.

Within a year of my starting to take time out twice a day to practice a simple mantra meditation, my bad habits had fallen away completely. I knew firsthand the powerful change that could happen to anyone. Within a few years, it became my mission to teach meditation to as many people as I could. I have kept on teaching ever since and have taught various techniques. Countless people have learned to meditate from me, and even if I met each person only briefly, I was certain in my heart that meditation would change their life.

Unfortunately, I came to see that there was a wide gap between the potential of what meditation could do and what it actually does. Part of the reason for this disconnect is that people give meditation only half a chance. They try it for a while, only to begin to skip their daily meditation because their days are too busy, and very soon they drop their practice, sometimes with the excuse that “I tried to meditate, but it didn’t work.” Or they seek a specific benefit like lowering their blood pressure, but getting results took too much patience compared with taking a pill. There are other factors, too: the disapproval of family and friends (far more likely thirty years ago than now, but the possibility still exists) or a fear of seeming strange and becoming isolated socially as someone who wanders off to the next bright, shiny object in the spiritual marketplace.

THE DIVIDED SELF

Eventually I saw that the problem lay much deeper, not in modern lifestyles but in the divided self that leads to such lifestyles. The divided self is something we all live with. Every day we put on different hats, depending on who we are relating to. We are different at home than at work, different with family than with strangers, different in our private thoughts than in the words we speak.

Meditation is like having all the king’s horses and all the king’s men trying to put Humpty-Dumpty together again. People can feel different forces contending inside themselves. A simple decision like choosing to lose five pounds becomes a struggle between the voices in our head, representing what we want to do on one side and why we cannot get there on the other (habit, inertia, impulsive desires, compulsive behavior, giving in to temptation, and so on). Ultimately, the forces of division win and the diet fails. You can’t put Humpty-Dumpty together again when you are Humpty-Dumpty. No one from the outside can repair another person’s divided self, and since the divided self is embedded so deep, it cannot repair itself, either.

Most people don’t know the terms divided self or fragmented self, but look at one of its by-products everyone does know about—our collective fascination with fame. We are stoked by mass media to believe that movie stars and other celebrities are lovely, special creatures. Not only do they look beautiful, each has a perfect love life and the most fulfilling kind of lifestyle. The reality is quite different, of course, and the other side of the coin is our relish at reading about a celebrity’s downfall through drugs, a failed relationship, or some kind of scandal. It’s an old story that people crave idols to worship, only to tear them down.

What we’re indulging in through celebrity worship is wish fulfillment. Forced to live with our own divided selves, we project perfection, which is wholeness, onto celebrities. We fantasize that they are privileged creatures who are exempt from reality. In our own life there are constant ups and downs, stretches of boredom, endless routine, and the grip of bad habits we cannot kick. We need to see that these limitations are the products of the divided self. Wish fulfillment doesn’t really help you when it comes to facing your own life. The journey of total meditation can.

The divided and fragmented self cannot do its own healing. It will continue to face ups and downs, inner contradictions, confusion, and conflict. If you look at yourself honestly, the flaws you see today have probably existed for years. If you are anxious and depressed today, it is highly unlikely to be the first time. If you give in to a bad habit like overeating, that habit has a history of actions and decisions. If you have negative psychological tendencies—such as a short temper, or giving in too easily to other people, or thinking of yourself as a victim—those traits also have a history. The momentum of life continues to roll along because when you try to fight against an ingrained habit, the struggle is between two aspects of the divided self. The aspect that wants to change faces off against the aspect that stubbornly refuses to change. The typical result is that neither wins, and the face-off continues.

The excitement that I first felt about meditation—and which countless people have also felt when they began to meditate—came from the discovery that there is a place inside everyone that is free of the divided self. Quiet and inner peace are good experiences, but their real importance lies in escaping inner conflict, turmoil, fear, depression, worry, confusion, and self-doubt. With a little practice, anyone can find this place inside, go there, and have the experience of a self that is whole and untroubled. Making that experience last is another matter.

WAKING UP, HERE AND NOW

The issue isn’t whether meditation can take you beyond the divided self—it can, without a doubt. The issue is how to heal the divided self, because the moment you open your eyes at the end of a meditation, the divided self returns to business as usual. As things stand, the only solution to this problem is based on repetition. If you just keep meditating day after day, year after year, everything will be resolved. “Stick with it” is good advice, and the promise that is held out—that one day you will be whole—is valid in rare cases. The tradition of meditation is thousands of years old in the East, and there are countless records of people waking up, becoming enlightened, finding wholeness, reaching unity consciousness—call it whatever you like.

Waking up is a real phenomenon, and it often occurs quite unpredictably. In Walden, Thoreau writes of “the solitary hired man on a farm in the outskirts of Concord, who has had his second birth.” (The very phrase second birth goes back to Vedic India many centuries ago.) Thoreau’s stay at Walden Pond was a symbol for the inner journey of waking up, which is the goal and natural outcome of meditation. He expressed how timeless and vast the experience feels when he wrote, “Zoroaster, thousands of years ago, travelled the same road and had the same experience, but he, being wise, knew it to be universal.”

Winter at Walden Pond was brutally cold, and Thoreau experienced conditions scarcely less harsh that the proverbial yogi sitting in the high altitude of a Himalayan cave. That image of hardship and privation has reinforced the notion, now stubbornly embedded in all cultures, that devoting oneself to meditation is arduous. Along with physical hardship, some other requirements sound very unpleasant. They range from worldly renunciation to mortification of the flesh, isolation from society, and, at the most extreme demand, a willingness in the name of God to be martyred (the sacrifice to be followed by waking up in Heaven to a blessed reward).

The overall effect of these embedded notions has been to discourage the average person from considering that higher consciousness might be within reach for anyone in daily life. However, waking up is rare only because we label it that way. Society sets apart those who have become enlightened, saintly, or spiritually advanced, however you want to put it. Marginality isn’t the same as rejection, though. In an age of faith, such figures were set apart to be revered. Today, when faith in a higher power has grown more suspect, these individuals are more likely to be viewed as outsiders from normal life, to be admired, shrugged off, or forgotten.

With this in mind, I searched for a way to make waking up part of normal life. First and foremost, total meditation had to be natural and effortless, because without that, meditation will keep falling short. A path that demands months and years of repetition using a fixed technique is far from being natural or effortless. Many people who begin the practice wonder if they are meditating correctly. Many others find the whole enterprise foreign to how they live—the average busy household doesn’t have much in common with a temple, monastery, or ashram. But the process that takes us closer to quiet mind and inner peace may be simpler than most of us think. We get glimpses of quiet mind in the presence of great art and music. We experience inner peace (hopefully) every night as we fall asleep after a day that has been enjoyable and untroubled (if we don’t experience this, every young child does). These glimpses come naturally and effortlessly.

Besides being effortless and natural, total meditation must be spontaneous. It must happen in the present moment as spontaneously as an unexpected burst of happiness or being struck by the beauty of a gorgeous sunset. In that way, waking up can flow in the here and now, merging into whatever else you are doing.

Finally, total meditation must be in line with each person’s own ultimate desires. It’s only natural to want more out of life, yet unfortunately the spiritual framework that surrounds meditation in many instances condemns desire. For thousands of years, desires, particularly of the flesh, were said to lower humans to the level of animals. Worldly desires supposedly pull us too much into the endless pursuit of external things like money and success. Succumbing to our passions supposedly undermines morality. What might bring short-term enjoyment supposedly won’t bring lasting happiness. These are familiar arguments, yet desire in itself is not a bad thing.

We cannot escape desire and shouldn’t be told that we must. Life unfolds through desire in every form, and winnowing out the higher desires, such as desiring to reach God, doesn’t succeed in practice. The so-called lower desires are inevitably part of the human experience. To reject them just reinforces the divided self.

If these three requirements are met—if waking up is natural and effortless, spontaneous, and in line with our personal desires—then the divided self can come to an end. It will take this entire book to support such a claim, because looking around, none of us sees someone who is whole and undivided. We cannot be blamed for assuming that there is no escape. Human nature simply is what it has always been. But waking up has always existed as well, and when it happens, consciousness does the healing that the divided self cannot accomplish on its own.

Total Meditation

Lesson 1: Being Aware

In this book you will learn to expand your awareness, to make it deeper, and, ultimately, to wake up to a new reality. To do all this you must firmly understand what awareness is. To begin with, awareness is an experience, the most basic experience possible. If you become aware of rain suddenly beginning to fall, awareness experiences change. If you are sitting calmly with your eyes closed and feel peaceful, awareness experiences the stillness of nonchange. Life may change, and sometimes it doesn’t, but awareness notices it all.

Here are a few ways to make you aware of awareness:

  • Put down this book and listen to any sound that occurs around you. By hearing the sound, you know you are present here and now. When you see, touch, taste, or smell anything, you also know that you exist here and now. Knowing that you are present is awareness.

    Now turn your attention away from the sound and ignore it. You are still present even when you ignore the five senses. Awareness is more basic than sights, sounds, tastes, textures, or smells. Our senses fill the mind with content, but awareness needs no content. Simply being here is the ground state of awareness.

  • Look at this book, then close your eyes and see it in your mind’s eye. Think the word book, then say the word aloud. What do these four experiences have in common? They were experienced in awareness. Words, thoughts, and images constantly change, but the recording medium doesn’t change—this is awareness.

  • Sit still for a moment and make your mind a blank. After a bit, the blankness will turn into a thought, image, or sensation. When this happens, make your mind a blank again. Watch as the blankness is replaced by a new thought, image, or sensation. Yet no matter whether your mind is empty or has something in it, you are always there. You have a sense of self that exists no matter what is happening or not happening. That sense of self is awareness.

TOTAL CONSCIOUSNESS AND YOU

Now that I’ve outlined the goal and structure of total meditation, let’s go deeper into the question that opened this chapter, a question that underlies everything: Can existence take care of itself? The answer is yes, Consciousness upholds creation. At this moment, and every moment since you were born, you are surrounded by the infinite intelligence and creative power of consciousness. I know these principles can be a little difficult to grasp in the beginning, but stay with me, because they are important for entering into total meditation.

If Nature holds one secret that makes life on Earth understandable, it is this: Life is consciousness. You already know that you have consciousness. Without it you would be mindless. The principles that consciousness follows permeate everything. It is mistaken to believe, as many scientists automatically assume, that consciousness didn’t appear until the human brain evolved. The most basic life forms follow the principles of consciousness by being self-organized and knowing exactly how to stay alive. These principles hold true even among life forms we consider totally primitive.

In 1973 a woman in Texas noticed a peculiar yellow blob that had sprung up in her backyard the way “fairy rings,” sudden growths of toadstools, can appear overnight. But the blob wasn’t a toadstool or anything the woman could recognize.

Biologists were consulted, and although the yellow blob quickly died, it was identified as a kind of slime mold, a life form going back at least a billion years. There was a flurry of publicity around this new variety, named Physarum polycephalum, but then it was forgotten until October 2019, when the Paris Zoological Park announced that it was putting the yellow blob on exhibit as a most extraordinary phenomenon. As CNN reported it, the blob

is bright yellow, can creep along at a speed of up to 4 centimeters (1.6 inches) per hour, can solve problems even though it doesn’t have a brain and can heal itself if it is cut in two.…[It] is neither a plant, an animal, nor a fungus. It doesn’t have two sexes, male and female—it has 720. And it can also split into different organisms and then fuse back together

As a strange biological curiosity, Physarum polycephalum created a sensation, but there is a deep mystery to consider here. Slime molds are incredibly basic life forms. There are nine hundred species, formerly classified as fungi but now given their own loosely organized kingdom. There is no real connection between the species except that they can function either as single-celled organisms or clumped together in a large community. In one part of their life cycle, they have the appearance of gelatinous slime.

The mystery is how a life form barely more complex than green algae floating as pond scum could be intelligent. When a study in the prestigious Proceedings of the Royal Society announced that the yellow blob could solve problems, the researchers meant that it could avoid noxious substances and remember what they were for up to a year. The blob also seemed able to find the quickest route to escape a labyrinth. Never mind that slime mold, which thrives on damp forest floors, is almost immortal. When faced with its only foes, light and drought, it can hibernate for several years and spring back to life again.

This is certainly an example of how existence takes care of itself, which is displayed by how the yellow blob exhibits qualities of consciousness. Besides being self-organizing and self-sustaining, it adapts to its surroundings, knows how to avoid toxins that threaten it, and solves problems.

There is no mystery to this if you accept that consciousness is part of existence. The two go together because they must, according to everything we observe about life. If existence was a blank, a tabula rasa, there is no physical force with the ability to create consciousness. Blankness is dead. Consciousness is alive. You can’t turn deadness into life, and yet obviously life appeared. So the obvious conclusion is that life was generated in the field of consciousness, which is alive already but invisible until consciousness takes physical form.

Here we do not need to be concerned with the metaphysical side of the argument. Our project is more practical: testing to see if a hypothesis is true—in this case, the hypothesis that existence can take care of us effortlessly, naturally, and spontaneously. Total meditation aims to prove that despite the divided self and all the problems it has created, consciousness has not abandoned human beings. It gives us the capacity to take care of our own life effortlessly by doing what every life form down to the yellow blob is doing: relying on the principles of consciousness. The only difference is that we have the choice whether to align with these principles or not. This choice escapes most people, however. The divided self has done its worst by disconnecting us from our source and then convincing us that this disconnect is normal.

THE WAY BACK

Any viable meditation will give you the experience of silent awareness, but the experience is often temporary and not very deep. You can close your eyes, sit still, and arrive at a similar experience (assuming that you aren’t agitated or stressed beforehand). What makes meditation different from simply closing your eyes is its ability to take you deeper into silent awareness. In Sanskrit this experience is known as samadhi. Yogis who can sit in samadhi deeply enough are able to do extraordinary things like slowing down their heart rate and reducing their oxygen consumption to a bare minimum. They can even raise their internal body temperature to the point that they can sit in the freezing cold without harm while wearing only a thin silk robe or nothing at all.

As a personal experience, samadhi shows us the difference between shallow silence and deep silence. In shallow silence, however, some important things can still happen. It was only recently discovered, for example, that simply by closing your eyes and engaging in slow, regular breathing, you can overcome stress. This technique, known as vagal breathing, represents a real breakthrough because of its simplicity and effectiveness. I’ve covered vagal breathing in previous books, but it is worth repeating here.

Vagal breathing takes its name from the vagus nerve, the longest and most complex of the ten cranial nerves that connect the brain with the rest of the body. The Latin word vagus means “wanderer,” and the vagus nerve certainly wanders. It links the brain with the heart, lungs, and abdomen, all areas that are highly sensitive to stress. The vagus nerve is also an afferent, or sensory, nerve, meaning that it transmits bodily sensations to the brain, including reactions associated with stress. The brain then sends signals in response, setting up a constant feedback loop. When you find yourself in a stressful situation, your heart rate goes up; you breathe in shallow, irregular bursts; and you feel tightness in your stomach and gut.

This circuitry of stress has been mapped and understood for a long time, but it also needed to be understood in reverse, meaning the circuitry of stress reduction. Searching for how meditation actually works in physical terms, researchers followed the clues left by breathing. So-called yogic breathing, for example, consists of exercises that control the breath, making it more regular, slower, and deeper. It turns out that regular, relaxed breathing is regulated by the vagus nerve, with its direct connection to brain, heart, and lungs. By stimulating the vagus nerve, you can induce the relaxation response. This discovery led to the widely publicized practice of vagal breathing, which is a quite simple way to stimulate the vagus nerve.

Vagal Breathing

An effective remedy in stressful situations

Step 1: Sit quietly with eyes closed.

Step 2: Easily breathe in to the count of four.

Step 3: Breathe out to the count of four, then pause for a count of one.

Step 4: Repeat for 5 minutes.

Given its total simplicity, vagal breathing helps not only to relieve stress but also to manage anger and anxiety. Medical research is also exploring the use of electrical vagus nerve stimulation in the treatment of various psychological and physical diseases. My coauthor Dr. Rudolph E. Tanzi of Harvard Medical School and I reported the possibilities in our book The Healing Self:

What’s mind bending, as viewed from conventional medical training, is how wide the possible benefits of vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) seem to be. Presently no less than thirty-two disorders are undergoing research, with indications of positive results. They begin with alcohol addiction, irregular heartbeat (atrial fibrillation), and autism, and run through a rogue’s gallery of physical and psychological illnesses: heart disease, mood disorders like depression and anxiety, a variety of intestinal disorders, addictions, and perhaps even memory loss and Alzheimer’s disease.

The possibilities of such research are unfolding rapidly, but what’s important for us here is that medical research has shown that the meditative state is natural and effortless. The shallow silence that is experienced even with a brief exposure to meditation achieves relaxation through the vagus nerve, and there is no separation between the physical and the mental side of relaxation. If shallow silence is so easily accessible, the deeper silence of samadhi should be just as natural and accessible.

The “wandering” nerve is not simply carrying signals all over the body, it is conveying consciousness. The fact that a single cranial nerve has holistic effects indicates how totally consciousness pervades mind and body. There isn’t just one mind-body connection. The totality of consciousness is at work, which is why total meditation will work. You aren’t fixing one thing at a time. You reconnect to the totality of consciousness. In that way you prove to yourself, as meditation unfolds, that existence can take care of you.

Consciousness gives of itself without reservation. When the tiniest speck of life on Earth appeared almost four billion years ago, it was more primitive than a bacterium. It had no DNA. It wasn’t even a one-celled creature like an amoeba. Yet just as a single fertilized egg in the womb has the entire structure of a human being in it, the first signs of primordial life were products of total, infinite consciousness. (Perhaps we should stop assigning a date to the origins of life. Nobel laureate in physics Brian Josephson has written, “Matter is alive and can make decisions,” which sounds like the utterance of a mystic. In fact, the ability of atoms to behave outside the predictions of fixed laws has been a mystery for more than a century, ever since the advent of quantum physics.)

Total Meditation

Lesson 2: Not “In Here,” Not “Out There”

We think it is only natural to divide mental experiences “in here” from physical experiences “out there.” For the sake of convenience, I use those terms here. But the sea of consciousness embraces everything, without boundaries and limitations. Because you are consciousness, you are free to respect boundaries—being awake doesn’t mean you get to walk on the grass if the sign says not to—while at the same time knowing that the boundaries are artificial. They don’t change your essential nature, which is unbounded.

To show how easily you can cross the line between “in here” and “out there,” here’s an exercise that erases the dividing line instantly:

  • Take your fingers and run them across something that has a rough texture, such as sandpaper. Immediately close your eyes and feel the same rough texture mentally.

  • Dip your hand in ice water, then immediately imagine the same freezing sensation.

  • Gaze on a crimson rose, then close your eyes and see it again “in here.”

There is no difference in where these experiences are located. They are not exclusively “out there” or “in here,” but in consciousness, which embraces both. If you imagine at this moment the texture of sandpaper, the cold of ice water, or the sight of a rose, these sensations aren’t as intense mentally as the physical sensation. But consider how vivid a dream can be. The things you see are as lifelike as in their physical appearance. The same goes for sounds heard in a dream. A small proportion of people can even go beyond sight and sound, being able to smell, taste, and touch in their dreams. Going that far isn’t necessary, however. The reality produced in dreams is as real for you as any experience “out there,” because dreams have the same basis in consciousness. (If you’re not convinced, think back to a time when you were startled awake from a nightmare. If that wasn’t a real experience, then why did you awake in a panic?)

Life always knows what to do, even if we doubt that we do. No one had to teach your heart how to beat. Humble skin cells undertake processes as complex as those in a brain cell. Red blood corpuscles, the only cells in your body that lack DNA, are regulated to know where to take their load of oxygen and when to unload it. Where does this knowing come from? In medical school, the brain is identified as the seat of consciousness, an assumption that has spread through society as common knowledge, but it is totally wrong, a mistaken notion born of pride.

Let’s drop the whole mistaken belief that limits consciousness to the thinking mind and assign it instead to everything in Nature. Let me offer a remarkable example of how totally consciousness upholds life. You might consider this example a digression from the topic of meditation, but I find it too fascinating to resist.

I’m going to describe a miracle of Nature, one that begins with a small Australian seabird known as Gould’s petrel (Pterodroma leucoptera). This bird is nondescript—about ten inches long, brown and gray above and white below—but its life cycle is so astonishing as to defy rational explanation.

Off the east coast of Australia lies Cabbage Tree Island, named for a kind of palm tree that covers it. When a fuzzy gray chick is born, a pair of Gould’s petrels start feeding it by going out to sea and returning with filled crops that regurgitate fish into the chick’s yawning mouth. This ritual occurs every night for three months. Then one night the parent birds fail to return. The chick waits. No parents show up, night after night. The chick begins to starve.

But instead of dying from hunger, the chick is motivated to escape its plight. Gould’s petrels nest on the ground in rock crevices covered by fallen palm fronds. The chick peers out, then ventures to the bottom of a nearby cabbage tree. It has never flown before, but somehow the chick knows that flight is its only escape.

Like albatrosses and other seabirds that are ungainly on land, a Gould’s petrel cannot take off unless it is helped by a breeze, and the forest floor of Cabbage Tree Island is dead still. The chick therefore decides to climb to the top of a tree to launch itself into the air. No one shows the baby bird the way, and it has never performed this feat. But up it goes, using curved claws and beak to ascend, stopping to rest when it must by wrapping its wings around the trunk. Weakened by hunger, the chick has only one chance to climb the tree. If it falls, it dies.

Once the fledgling makes its ascent, its perils aren’t quite over, because the crown of a cabbage tree is outfitted with sharp, spiny thorns on which the chick can get caught. If it makes it through this trap, it throws itself out into the air, another life-or-death moment. The wind has to favor the bird, and it must use its wings to fly rather than simply drop back to earth, which would be fatal.

Should the chick successfully mount the breeze, the most remarkable part of the story commences. For the next five to six years a Gould’s petrel never sees land again. Constantly soaring and feeding from the surface of the sea, they sleep, perhaps as little as forty minutes a night, by alternating which side of the brain is sleeping or awake…in midflight! Eventually they return from their travels all over the Tasman Sea to the same dot of an island where they were born—an island smaller by comparison than a single period on a sheet of typing paper. There they mate and their life cycle begins again.

Reflect upon the overlapping mysteries involved in this one subspecies of bird. Naturalists can observe Gould’s petrel and describe its behavior, but every step defies explanation. To say that instinct or genetics guides the fledgling is the best that science can do at this time. But consider this: DNA has only one function, to produce the major proteins and enzymes that structure a cell. The blueprint of a cell isn’t alive. How would DNA tell a petrel on its maiden flight to look down until it sees tiny squid and fish just below the surface of the water, and then to dive, skim the surface, and catch its prey, a complex maneuver at the best of times, which the petrel has never seen performed?

Instinct fares no better, because there has to be a basis for how each step is timed in the petrel’s first flight, and the only signal involved is hunger, which drives the chick out of its hole in the rocks. Where did it get the specific behavior of climbing a palm tree, a feat for which it is very poorly equipped, even with sharp claws? Instinct is basically a way of fudging our ignorance, palming off complex behaviors throughout the animal kingdom as somehow built in. How remains a complete mystery.

Everything a petrel chick does exhibits conscious traits. It has an intention. It knows what it needs to do. It acts according to a time schedule, and it doesn’t need teaching, possessing every bit of knowledge innately. Unless all these things are coordinated, any single step on the way to taking flight will not work. In fact, the whole chain of behaviors must exist to avoid fatal consequences at every step. Even the fact that a petrel chick gorges on food until it weighs a third more than its parents prepares it for the famine when the parents mysteriously fail to return one night. The petrel then must subsist on its body fat for two weeks. What seems undeniable is that this bird doesn’t know just one thing or another. It knows everything necessary for its existence.

The only viable explanation for the intricate behavior of Gould’s petrel lies beyond instinct and genes, in consciousness alone. Consciousness expresses itself through intelligent, orderly, creative ways. The result is that existence can take care of itself and, by extension, us.

Total Meditation

Lesson 3: Inner Knowing

The mind of a two-year-old child is active and curious, hungry to know everything that is happening around them. From this beginning we grow up to know all manner of things. These things get compiled into our personal fund of knowledge, whether this involves speaking French or learning to roller-skate. But knowledge isn’t the same as knowingness, which comes first. There is a state of inner knowing that everyone has. It is innate. You cannot be conscious without it. In meditation we deepen our inner knowing, but first we need to recognize what knowing is.

Here are a few ways to make you aware of inner knowing.

The human condition—namely the complex and conflicting characteristics of who we are—has been lamented for centuries, but there is a counterview that offers a solution. It looks on total consciousness as a reality that permeates human life as completely as it permeates everything in Nature—but with a difference. We can take control of it. Total consciousness isn’t a force outside us that acts like a master puppeteer dangling us on invisible strings. Thanks to free will, Homo sapiens long ago snapped the strings. We unfold our potential according to our own desires. We have aspirations, which no other living creature can claim to have.

No one threw us out of the natural order. We leaped out of our own accord. We make up our own mind, and, with the freedom to aspire, civilizations rise and fall. The ultimate aspiration survives the fall of empires, though. It is the aspiration to experience total consciousness and the transformation that comes with it. Is it possible to actually access the consciousness that governs the cosmos and the smallest speck of life? The answer is yes, but it will take a whole chapter to unpack what yes really means.